- 07:28 AM
- 11/05/24
| Location: | The Upper Midwest |
|---|---|
| Member since: | August 09, 2003 |
| Last visit: | August 31, 2005 |
taupe has posted 3 links and 44 comments to SportsFilter and 35 links and 148 comments to the Locker Room.
The Malice In The Palace: What's the answer? Clearly the fans were chiefly culpable, and I for one would be disappointed if this didn't result in the cancellation and forfeiture of at least one Pistons home game.
posted by taupe to basketball at 10:44 PM on November 19, 2004 - 177 comments
NBA fantasy league?: I'm provisionally creating a Yahoo league with a live draft time of 1:30 p.m. EDT, Friday, October 22nd, and hoping that I'll be able to change that time. (The live draft times are insanely limited, and there are no evening or weekend hours available that aren't this coming weekend.) Any interest?
posted by taupe to fantasy at 08:28 PM on October 14, 2004 - 46 comments
Grab your socks!: SpoFi EPL Fantasy League 2004-2005 is open for business. (details inside)
posted by taupe to fantasy at 10:49 PM on July 21, 2004 - 52 comments
EPL Fantasy League 2003-2004 Final. Congratulations to kWaCkY, whose Kwacky's Kwitters have won the league by a scant eight points over squealy's Ardley Athletic (despite the latter's final-week-winning 72). Remaining imaginary European places go to bluebears, Bayern Mucus, and winners-of-May-and-week-37 Mossy Athletic. Do we split leagues now? Keep one big league? That's for next season, the preoccupation of thirty-one of us who've played. This season, the one that belonged to Arsenal, belongs to the thirty-second, kWaCkY. (final tables and more inside)
posted by taupe to navel gazing at 04:20 PM on May 17, 2004 - 107 comments
EPL Fantasy League Week 36 (May). At least no one has Europe to worry about anymore, at least for this year. kWaCkY, on the basis of the instinct that told him to choose Frank Lampard as captain despite Arsenal's two games, has five points on quealy and 25 on Andy Griffiths going into the final fortnight. Week-winners Bayern (67) lead the also-rans for the illusory last Champions League spot that we don't have. We may not have relegation, either, but we still have the refreshing fruit-flavored table row colors. I don't know what else to say. (more inside)
posted by taupe to navel gazing at 08:28 PM on May 06, 2004 - 11 comments
I want to be either the scrum half of this ABA team, or whoever gets to hold a bat.
posted by taupe at 07:43 PM on November 23, 2004
So which is the thread, now? Is this the thread? I don't think we can know how fair the suspensions actually are until Stern drops whatever other shoe he plans to drop on the Pistons organisation. The Oakland County cops may or may not be able to mete out the appropriate individual justice to each of the scores of fans who threw shit. But as things stand after just the player suspensions, those same fans, whether prosecuted or not, have the satisfaction of having successfully provoked their strongest division rival into destroying their season. That ain't right. If we're just talking the player end, it would have been fairer to swap Jackson's and Artest's suspensions, and maybe add onto Artest's the requirement of an affidavit saying he's received and is still undergoing treatment for anger-management issues before letting him back in the league. The profile that's emerging of Artest is of someone with a genuine mental illness, and people in that position need help. Someone before has already nailed it that the union's efforts are best invested in addressing the conditions in which management makes them play, rather than simply fighting these suspension lengths for the sake of so doing and prolonging the ugliness.
posted by taupe at 07:42 PM on November 23, 2004
Did this thread die, then, with the slap party in the new one?
Well, let's clean things up, then.
sic, you're a chimpanzee.
rcade, there's a lot more to detest about Metafilter than its preoccupation with current affairs.
The neverending soap opera of running piss fights between this poster and that was the big reason for me when I wrote it off -- whatever Crossfire issue-of-the-day being merely the backdrop for same -- and with it all the snide rhetorical smartassery and bruised-ego defensiveness that made it nothing better than a blue Usenet.
And, God damn, if your every comment from here on down (and on and on) didn't remind me of exactly that.
Thank you all the same for eventually returning focus to emerging models of what actually happened, but...let's not talk any time soon.
crank, your posts are worthy of respect, and you've got some good points.
I should have been clearer in the reply that started this whole ugly mess that, when I started seeing idiots everywhere, it was really those other discussions, those hives I was talking about, moreso than this thread (although we did have some ringers here).
And in those other discussions, there were plenty of people who were perfectly happy willfully to play one-player Telephone with the very videotaped evidence we've all been talking about.
Apart from that, I'm unsure how my asking others not to be so eager to lay down the smack on Artest for "just a cup of beer" is necessarily inconsistent with my own acknowledged eagerness to punish sins of intellect -- the situations aren't quite analogous.
And I wish I could concede to you your characterisation of my characterisation of the average schmuck any of us have to deal with in our daily lives as a "strawman", but...caramba, it's no strawman, at least among those fool enough to open their mouths within earshot of me or nearly anyone I know who's had reason to comment about same.
Props to you for being a more forgiving sort than I, but I just don't see it the same way. I'll continue in a quieter vein in the other thread(s) on this topic.
posted by taupe at 07:14 PM on November 23, 2004
And now dzot and rcade post.
The point about my having said that the fans were "[c]learly...chiefly culpable" has merit, I'll admit; I didn't necessarily know that when I said that.
You've found that mote in my eye, rcade, and congratulations.
One problem: spotting that one instance of my failure to meet a certain standard perfectly, even if I were the one proposing said standard, doesn't address the question of your own standing with respect to that same standard, or that of anybody else in this thread.
I mean, I'll back away from saying that the fans were "clearly chiefly culpable" if you'll back away from "haymakers" and "clearly assault".
Dig?
(And if I can be permitted a digression of my own, rcade, you are doing me one service: with your steadfast efforts to impart a Metafilter-esque tone to this thread, you've reminded we why I long since stopped reading Metafilter.)
And dzot: "anyone who doesn't see things [my] way"?
I stand by the assertion that a thorough and systematic contempt for fact, as both practiced directly by the Administration and encouraged through manipulation of public opinion, fundamentally underpinned the entirely avoidable present nightmare in Iraq.
If you want to say I'm wrong about that, then you've got to offer some pretty creative interpretations of pretty much anything anyone's revealed about the intelligence available at the relevant time, or the Administration's handling of same.
And again, see my previous post about alleged linkages of opinions about this to opinions about what we used to be talking about.
And no, I'm not going to veto trades, or probably do much of anything out of the ordinary unless somebody complains. And my own team won't manage to break out of ninth place, either.
posted by taupe at 09:31 PM on November 22, 2004
crank, if I'm to accept that you're engaging in anything other than discussion-board axe-grinding yourself, I've got to know what assertion of mine, real or imagined, you wish to deny.
Do you deny that "the typical American", theoretical construct of statistical averages with no necessary literal instantiation though he-she-or-it may be, has the problems in question?
To ask exactly the same question, do you deny that more actual real Americans have them than don't?
I just can't agree with you, then.
Maybe I'm wrong on the numbers -- though the last, most comprehensive counting of said numbers suggests strongly that I'm not -- but the mere fact that you can't necessarily find a real so-called "typical American", any one individual who's a member of all majority subsets simultaneously, doesn't prevent you from ever making any generalisations about the full set at all.
You also can't claim to know how anyone who generalises similarly conceives of the generalisations he or she uses.
Do you deny being the kind of falangist retrograde who can't tell one raghead from another and doesn't care?
That's nice, but calm down -- I never really said that you were.
Saying "there's an error I see being committed by people who do X, and that error also underpins the greater and more monstrous doing of Y" is not the same thing as saying "everybody who does X also does Y".
I said the former, and perhaps I should have been more clear about saying it that way; you seem to think I said the latter.
Do you deny that anyone in this thread (other than, I suppose, me) has indulged in knee-jerk lynch-mobbery of one stripe or another vis-a-vis this whole thing with the guys in the place?
Can't fully agree with you here, either.
It's been much worse in hives of muppetry like ESPN's Sports Nation discussion boards, and probably in just about any sports discussion site other than SportsFilter.
But, regrettably, I've seen it here, and for this reason alone, by no means does what I've said have "absolutely zero to do with" anyone here.
On a less serious note, I'm also commissioner of our fantasy league, and we maybe have to figure out how we deal with things going forward.
trox, who has Artest and seemed to have had the most future up-side in terms of games he could still apply, looks the most screwed. I was concerned about sportsBabel, who just before Friday's incident had agreed to trade Tracy McGrady to dusted and looked as though he'd look to Jackson to fill the resulting void at SG, but sB has since made a great pickup in Fred Jones.
posted by taupe at 08:46 PM on November 22, 2004
It's this willingness to assume, from often sloppy, superficial and lazy observation, that one knows the underlying facts of a situation with sufficient completeness to justify indulging one's urges towards self-righteousness, that prompted my comment about the "typical American" that offended rcade so very, very much.
That it's better to feel justified than to be justified is, for just one example, why at least a hundred thousand people are dead and a good hunk of southwest Asia is going to be a big version of Beirut for the next fifty years or so.
A centuries-old tradition of anti-intellectualism underpinned it, talk radio fueled it, an election certified it, and now nothing can fucking stop it.
Do you wonder why I might be sore about it? And obviously I wish rcade hadn't illustrated my point exactly with the "haymakers" distortion, even if he did retreat tactically into the "clearly assault" stance when he was called on it.
And even then, I'd think that if we're indeed insisting on deference to civilised society's means of meteing out proper retribution for injustice, we should wait for the jury trial, complete with depositions from the fan Artest confronted (the one who said that Artest asked him "did you do it"), the fans and staff members around him, and Artest himself, before even calling Artest's actions (in that setting, anyway) "clearly assault".
This isn't a niggling technicality, either -- "reared back his right hand to punch the guy but was stopped by several fans" is an interpretation of Artest's motives, and even of the action itself, based on a view of the incident from a single camera angle, and before we can actually rule out other hypotheses including "reared back his right hand to strike but then stopped himself" or "raised his right arm for some other reason", we can really use the additional information.
The same goes for the "shove", the "open slap", and really everything else.
In the meantime, feel free to say "ARTEST SMASH!" another half dozen times, at the risk of further deflecting toward one (hardly blameless) guy and away from any possible broader systemic ill arising from the marriage of base human impulses and greed.
Maybe someone will put forward a more convincing argument about the particulars. I'd welcome it -- that is in fact the only way to get to the right answer, which is the whole point.
Respect for the basic intellectual disciplines of, one, acknowledging the limits of one's own knowledge of fact, and two, caring enough to work to expand those limits, has reached an ebb in the society I unfortunately lack the means to flee, and this more than anything is why we're all irrevocably screwed.
posted by taupe at 06:18 PM on November 22, 2004
General discussion surrounding this incident does indeed bring into sharp relief how much the typical American (among others, certainly) so loves having strong opinions about things, and so doesn't love doing the basic homework required to support those opinions.
Hardly a new observation this month, but here it pops up again.
posted by taupe at 04:47 PM on November 21, 2004
"I've either been shot in the face or had a beer thrown at me! I won't know till the lab results get back..."
Come on.
The range of possibilities isn't limited to "shot in face" or "beer".
It includes "thing with battery in it", "thing with harmful substance in it", "thing that may just have injured me and threatened my professional career though I don't know it yet".
Again, I'd like to see the nebbishes react in a similar situation without prior warning, and honestly process it as anything more than "thing thrown at me".
posted by taupe at 06:40 PM on November 20, 2004
jbou has the best line of the thread so far.
The nugget of sanctimony enjoying broad circulation in discussions of this that's nauseating me the most is the whole "only a cup of beer" canard leveled against Artest.
Okay, you're in a heated emotional situation in which somebody essentially threw a punch at you not a minute ago, and you're trying, in whatever (perhaps half-assed) way, to stay out of the rest of things.
Then something thrown at you hits you with force.
In a split second you're supposed to identify the missile and place it in its proper responsible context of potential threats?
(Also, chicobangs' link explaining the Mike Curtis rule requires registration.
While a lot of the unwritten codes in professional sport that justify violent action in certain situations do need to be exposed as the childish macho bullshit they are, this Mike Curtis rule if I understand it correctly seems manifestly sane -- step onto the field/court, you're a security risk, pure and simple, and anyone in a position to do something about it should have leeway in doing so.)
posted by taupe at 03:42 PM on November 20, 2004
About that celebration on the field...who were those two little kids? They were running around chasing each other between the mound and first base.
posted by taupe at 11:07 PM on October 27, 2004
Did the Rams' Super Bowl win get most Cardinals fans to finally shut up about 1987 and Hrbek bla bla wrestling bla? Because if not, then the bad thing about this is that they still wouldn't shut up about it.
posted by taupe at 10:59 PM on October 27, 2004
"Who among us knows hoops, loves fantasy sports, and can handle the merciless public taunting that would result from failure?" Not our league's commissioner, that's for sure.
posted by taupe at 03:45 PM on October 27, 2004
Well, that was fun. The roster-setting seems to be bugged with the display of opponents, though.
posted by taupe at 09:47 PM on October 25, 2004
We're at 13 teams now, which makes the league 104 players deep the way we've got it. Since I like dusted's one-Util idea, and since 104's kind of light, I'm adding the one Util slot and keeping the three bench positions. I'll check again this coming afternoon, and if we're not at at least 15 teams by then, we'll keep the nine-player rosters. If we break 15, we can expect eight (one Util, two bench).
posted by taupe at 03:38 AM on October 25, 2004
Spofi Fantasy NBA Midseason Report:
Since I don't remember any precedent for a situation like this, I'm going to stay hands-off on the Gasol-Redd trade, and leave it to people to click "Vote against trade" if they think it should be cancellable. (My own instinct is that them's the breaks, and that if there's a desire for a "failed physical" out for trades, we should write it into our rules at the start of next season.)